Utah's new dino-stars

The skull of a new species of duckbill dinosaur, deemed "one of the most magnificent" ever found, was unveiled Wednesday, and the find provides important clues about the evolution of the large plant-eaters.

The Gryposaurus monumentensis, the species name reflecting its discovery in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, was a huge, rugged, thick-boned, 800-tooth plant-eater. It is one of three dinosaur species uncovered in Utah that are earning renown.

The Gryposaurus made its debut during a press conference Wednesday at Grand Staircase-Escalante and in the pages of the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

"It was a monster," said Terry Gates, paleontologist with the Utah Museum of Natural History at the University of Utah.

Another species, the therizinosaur, was a sickle-clawed dinosaur uncovered in the badlands near Big Water, Kane County, and is the subject of a handsome new exhibit at the Museum of Northern Arizona.

And two new ceratopsid (horned) dinosaurs, also discovered at Grand Staircase-Escalante, are being introduced in Survey Notes, the journal of the Utah Geological Survey, by James I. Kirkland, Utah's state paleontologist, and the survey's Donald D. DeBlieux.

Experts said the Gryposaurus monumentensis was found several years ago by the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology, which is based on a high school campus in Claremont, Calif. Excavations were carried out in 2003, and difficult preparation work on the bones continued after that.

Overseeing the work was then-University of Utah graduate student Terry Gates, who is now a paleontologist at the Utah Museum of Natural History.

Gates said other species of the same genus Gryposaurus were discovered in the Canadian province of Alberta and in Montana. They were the dominant plant-eaters of the region, including Utah, 74 million years ago during the Cretaceous Era. But only 1 million years later, the time of the new find — still during the Cretaceous — the genus was extinct except in the Four Corners area.

Some change in the environment may have been the cause of the rapid change in dinosaurs.

This type of duckbill dinosaur had powerful jaws, making it the Cretaceous version of a "weed whacker," Gates said.

In life, it was about 30 feet long, including its 10-foot-long tail. The dinosaur stood at least 10 feet tall and boasted a three-foot skull.

Arizona exhibit

The Museum of Northern Arizona's new exhibit features a towering skeletal model of the clawed 93-million-year-old therizinosaur and was curated by David D. Gillette, a paleontologist at the museum.